HabBear gave a great response below:
Third, ICOs (initial coin offerings) are being used by companies (startups mostly) as a way to raise capital and serves as an alternative to having ads in an app or charging for "in app purchases", instead you have these tokens that are you can redeem for goods or services offered by the company but you're not tied to them, they can be traded for other tokens to get other benefits and other companies.
I would add a couple of points to this:
Four, crowdsales empowers future development in a good way. ICOs give start-ups the ability to crowdsale and not have to deal with private, angel, and venture capital investors.
True: scammers are putting ICOs in a bad light. But as this space matures, hopefully, standards and better rating systems will emerge. But you will never get rid of greed and fraud.
Five, the potential of a
TRUE Trustless Network has not been realized. The space is still in its infancy and could remove many of the problems associated with privacy violations, selling of personal info, and ad schemes.
Six, BTC may be the current king, but it has serious issues with security, transaction speeds, and scaling...All of blockchain does.
At (7) transactions per second, exactly how is BTC going to provide point-of-sale transactions for the globe?
Ethereum isn't going to do it either, they max out at (20) per second.
Compare that to VISA who is the largest provider in the world at 24,000 per second and can handle global point-of-sale (physical and web) or
enterprise level transactions.Blockchain cannot support large data sets or enterprise level systems. A real world example was December of 2017 when the action for all crypto was drastically up and transactions took minutes (at times up to 30 minutes) and exchange withdrawals were being made unavailable for a day or more. (bc of the consensus delay)
Imagine 5 people standing in line trying to checkout at a physical location and lets say the transaction time was 3 minutes. The 5th person would wait 15 minutes just to start checking out.
That's not gonna work.
Not to mention PoW wastes massive amounts of energy.
“In a distributed consensus based on the proof of Work, miners need a lot of energy. One Bitcoin transaction required the same amount of electricity as powering 1.57 American
households for one day (data from 2015).” [2]
Clearly, there is a lot of poor engineering in existence because the space is new and we are learning. BTC is a great store of value but is not practical for making everyday transactions possible.
This is exactly the point all the crypto-haters and economics people make in articles, blogs, and on TV.
REFERENCES:
[1]
https://howmuch.net/articles/crypto-transaction-speeds-compared[2]
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/
